NewsTrust - Education Reform - Most Recent Stories: News (Independent)

College for $99 a Month

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Monthly - By Kevin Carey - Oct. 05 (Special Report) - Colleges are caught in the same kind of debt-fueled price spiral that just blew up the real estate market. They’re also in the information business in a time when technology is driving down the cost of selling information to record, destabilizing lows.

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Dream of a Common Language. Sueño de un Idioma Común

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Texas Monthly - By Nate Blakeslee - Aug. 24 (Special Report) - ... the dual language experiment has been a success by any measure. By the sixth grade, kids in the program—regardless of which language they spoke when they first enrolled—are outscoring native English speakers on the TAKS tests. They can also read, write, and speak Spanish at a sophisticated level.

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Vietnam War Architect Robert McNamara Dies at 93

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Howard Zinn, Marilyn Young, onathan Schell, Amy Goodman - Jul. 07 (News Analysis) - Over half a million Americans went to war on his watch, a war that ultimately killed over 58,000 American soldiers and at least 3 million Vietnamese. ... Less well-known is McNamara’s key involvement in the firebombing of 67 japanese cities shortly before the end of World War II that destroyed 50 to 90 percent of the cities. He described the bombing operations he analyzed under the general Curtis Lemay in a 2003 documentary by Errol Morris, “The Fog of War.” In a single night on March 10th, 1945, he told Morris, quote, “We burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo—men, women, and children.”

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Teaching in the Downturn

Mon, 11 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

tolerance.org - By Jennifer Holladay & Tim Lockette - May. 11 (Special Report) - Few of today's teachers can remember an economic situation quite like the one we now face. To find analogies for the collapse of the housing bubble and the subsequent credit crisis, we have to search not our memories but our textbooks. The Great Gatsby and The Grapes of Wrath suddenly make more sense now. Generations of students have groaned at the task of memorizing acronyms like FDIC or FNMA: now they seem to leap off the pages of the history books. What will happen next? Will the economy bounce back, or will a wave of foreclosures create an invisible "Dust Bowl," uprooting hundreds of thousands of people? And how do we teach in this environment? To help our readers navigate these uncharted waters, we called in the experts. In the interviews below, social critic Meizhu Lui offers her take on where the crisis may lead us, and psychologist Melanie Killen talks about how to help your students cope in a time when the economic news is grim.

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Crossing the Gap

Mon, 11 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

tolerance.org - By Tim Lockette - May. 11 (Special Report) - Brandon Saunders has trouble believing there are places like New Trier High School — a public school with an ivy-walled, university-like campus, with gyms for almost every sport, a multi-room college counseling center, and bright-eyed teachers planning their lessons in cubicle-like offices as up-to-date as any in corporate America. "It's immaculate," he said after seeing New Trier's campus. "I was blown away." Amanda Cohen has trouble believing there are schools where kids have to share textbooks, where parents are asked to supply toilet paper, and where no one comes to fix a bathroom without a door.

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How a Student-Friendly Kindle Could Change the Textbook Market

Wed, 06 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Chronicle of Higher Education - By Jeffrey R. Young - May. 06 (News Report) - Rumors that Amazon will introduce a wide-format Kindle have the news media and bloggers speculating about whether the new gadget will spark an electronic-textbook revolution and lighten backpacks nationwide.

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An Unlikely Duo Pushes for Entrepreneurship in Schools

Wed, 06 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Seyward Darby - May. 06 (Special Report) - An "odd couple" of think tanks have combined forces on education reform. This morning, the Center for American Progress (CAP), the organization that spawned numerous Obama administration officials and policy ideas, and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), considered a leading architect of Bush administration policy, unveiled a joint report on innovation and entrepreneurship in education. Seated on a panel at the swanky Hotel Monaco on F Street, representatives of the two groups shared friendly jabs--literally, they were nudging each other behind the microphones--about how unlikely it had seemed that the two groups would ever find common ground. But they found it, and the fruits of their labors are detailed in the report "Stimulating Excellence: Unleashing the Power of Innovation in Education."

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Barack Obama & the DC School Voucher Program

Tue, 05 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Reason Magazine - By Nick Gillespie - May. 05 (Special Report) - Mercedes Campbell is one of the 1,700 students in the Washington, D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, a school-voucher program authorized by Congress in 2004. The program gives students up to $7,500 to attend whatever school their parents choose. For kids like Mercedes, who now attends Georgetown Visitation Prep, the DC voucher program is a way out of one of the worst school districts in the country.

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An education bubble? Data from the explosion of AP tests

Tue, 05 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Culture11 - By Razib - May. 05 (Special Report) - One datum that suggests an irrational bubble in education is that a much larger fraction of the population is going to college now, and that not surprisingly the average IQ of college students has declined by about 2/3 s.d. -- admissions boards began to scrape deeper down into the sludgebucket of society.

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Frist visits, boosts education reform

Tue, 05 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

timesfreepress.com - May. 05 (News Report) - When it comes to working out the details of a pet project, it’s all about who you know, said former U.S. Senator Bill Frist. Dr. Frist, a former Senate majority leader, stopped by Orchard Knob Elementary on Monday to brainstorm with teachers on how to improve education across the state. Orchard Knob was the first of 40 stops Dr. Frist will make across Tennessee during the information-gathering phase of his initiative, the State Collaborative on Reforming Education, or SCORE.

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Gentrification, Education, and School Reform

Mon, 04 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

indypendent.org - By Alex Kane - May. 04 (News Report) - gentrification not only transforms the social and economic infrastructure of poor neighborhoods, but may also displace the existing school system.”

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Putting Students on the Same High-Performance Page

Sun, 03 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Congressional Quarterly - By Lydia Gensheimer - May. 03 (News Report) - What happens when you have a law that’s supposed to improve performance among the nation’s school children but instead it creates confusion, lowers expectations and can result in a “dummying down” of state standards? That’s what a panel of educational experts is trying to address with a plan to incorporate common academic standards. They are urging Congress to support a state-led initiative to develop more-uniform, clear and integrated standards that reflect both the global marketplace and Americans’ mobility within the country.

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Arne Duncan tells Education Writers Association: NCLB has to go (the name, not the law)

Sun, 03 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

thenotebook.org - By Dale Mezzacappa - May. 03 (News Report) - Secretary of Education Arne Duncan addressed the annual convention of the Education Writers Association in Washington, DC Thursday night, and he said that the name "No Child Left Behind" has to go. "The name 'No Child Left Behind' is toxic," he said. Duncan doesn't want to scrap NCLB by a long shot, but he wants to see some changes, especially in how schools are evaluated. He called himself a big fan of value-added methods of judging school progress -- in other words, looking at growth in test scores -- rather than relying on a basic proficiency rate.

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Yellow Light on Student Loan Reform

Sat, 02 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Inside Higher Ed - May. 02 (News Report) - A compromise 2010 budget resolution released Tuesday by Congressional leaders gives the Obama administration a chance to push its plan to restructure the federal student loan programs -- but also sends a clear signal to the White House that lawmakers remain skeptical about the president's proposal to largely eliminate the lender-based Federal Family Education Loan Program.

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Colleges Using Technology to Recruit Students Try to Hang On to the Conversation

Sat, 02 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Chronicle of Higher Education - By Sara Lipka - May. 02 (Special Report) - With social media, anyone can chime in. Colleges that were once occupied with staying on message are warily opening up to the e-masses—and trying to get used to that.

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Student Lending Would Change Under Senate's Budget Plan

Fri, 01 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Chronicle of Higher Education - By Kelly Field - May. 01 (News Report) - The U.S. Senate last night gave final approval to a budget blueprint that sets the stage for an overhaul of student lending.

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House Panel Considers Federal Role in Standards

Fri, 01 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Education Week - By Alyson Klein - May. 01 (News Report) - Key state officials, congressional leaders, and the president of the one of the national teachers’ unions all agreed at a hearing today that the United States needs to move toward common academic standards to stay competitive in an increasingly globalized economy—and that states must be the vehicle for the change.

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Initial Aid Is Puzzle to Track

Fri, 01 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Education Week - By Michele McNeil - May. 01 (News Report) - States and federal agencies are off to a slow and uneven start in allowing the public to track the first allotments from up to $100 billion in new education funding under the federal economic-stimulus package, despite strong pledges of transparency for the program from the Obama administration.

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Big changes needed in America's schools, education secretary says

Fri, 01 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

MLive.com - By Julie Mack - May. 01 (News Report) - Saying "more of the same is not going to get us to where we need to go," U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan is promising sweeping reforms in American education over the next four years. "This is an absolutely historic moment" with tens of billions of dollars being poured into preschool, the K-12 system and higher education to improve outcomes, Duncan said in a speech Thursday at a conference of the Education Writers Association. Duncan said repeatedly that there needs to be more transparency in education so that parents can recognized which schools are effective and which are failing. He criticized state-standardized tests, for instance, for in effect dumbing down their tests so that most students pass the exams.

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Can Mere Existence of Obama Administration Reduce Test Stereotype Threat

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Miller-McCune - Apr. 24 (News Analysis) - Research of Culture blogger Sameer Pandya writes about The Institute for Research on Education Policy and Practice at Stanford University, which has just released a study on the effects of the California High School Exit Exam on graduation rates that found negative effects of the CAHSEE fall disproportionately on minority and female students.

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Rise in Distance Enrollments

Mon, 06 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Inside Higher Ed - By Scott Jaschik - Apr. 06 (News Report) - Community colleges continue to see increases in distance education enrollments, according to a report released at the annual meeting of the American Association of Community Colleges here.

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Obama Education Plan Speech: Stricter Standards, Charter Schools, Merit Pay

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Libby Quaid - Mar. 10 (News Report) - President Barack Obama called for tying teachers' pay to student performance and expanding innovative charter schools Tuesday, embracing ideas that have provoked hostility from members of teachers unions.

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More Low-Income Students Taking AP Classes

Wed, 04 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Education Week - By Catherine Gewertz - Feb. 04 (Special Report) - More students from low-income families are taking and passing Advanced Placement tests, but non-Asian minority students—particularly African-Americans—are still underrepresented among those taking and passing the tests of college-level material, according to results released today.

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In Central New York's multiage classrooms, children help each other

Tue, 03 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Syracuse.com - By Debra J. Groom - Feb. 03 (Special Report) - Kathryn and Jazmine are in different grades, but they are in the same class in the Mexico school district's New Haven Elementary -- a multiage classroom called the Beehive.

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Learning Technologists Look on the Bright Side of Budget Cuts

Tue, 03 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Ohmynews - By William Pollard - Feb. 03 (News Report) - At Learning Technologies, a conference and exhibition in London last week, there was recogniton that training budgets were under pressure in the credit crunch. However there was also confidence that a strong case can be made for e-learning and increased use of the Web as a means to deliver more results for less cost. Adobe promoted Connect and demonstrated a fundamental switch from Postscript origins to a Flash future, behaviour consistent with the Andrew S. Grove theory that "Only the paranoid survive."

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